NASA has lost communication with its Capstone spacecraft, the space agency announced Tuesday afternoon.
Capstone, or the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Operations and Navigation Technology Experiment, launched on June 28 from New Zealand, and everything seemed normal for the tiny, 55-pound minisatellite during and after liftoff.
“The spacecraft team is currently working to determine the cause and restore contact,” a NASA blog post said at 12:29 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
The spacecraft successfully separated from the upper stage of Rocket Labs’ Photon rocket on July 4, setting the spacecraft on a slow but efficient trajectory intended to put it in orbit around the Moon by mid-November. Capstone is designed to explore an unusual orbit that NASA hopes will eventually host a space station to help lunar astronauts when they begin exploring the moon’s south pole later this decade.
It’s unclear whether or not that mission is in jeopardy, but according to a NASA update, the communications breakdown appears to be in the Capstone, not the Deep Space Network, an array of large antennas that NASA uses to communicate with missions beyond Earth’s orbit.
Capstone, “is experiencing communication problems while in contact with the Deep Space Network,” NASA wrote on the blog. “The team has good data on the spacecraft’s trajectory based on the first full and second partial passes of the ground station with the Deep Space Network.”
That trajectory information, the blog post adds, will allow ground controllers to delay by several days the course correction maneuvers needed to point Capstone in the right direction, buying engineers more time to figure out what happened and possibly fix it.
NASA will provide additional updates about Capstone on the space agency’s blog.
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